Tim Grobaty: Our wild, wild life includes varmints of every stripe

We live, apparently, out in the country, where nature's food chain is palpable. And lately, new characters have been added to it. It's like the uncut version of "The Farmer in the Dell" out in our yard.

The bottom of the food chain at our house - and it's more like a food pyramid, because the lower you go, the more things there are to be eaten - we suppose, are things like dust motes and butterfly eggs. We're going to skip ahead a few notches to avocados, cable TV and high-speed Internet access and home appliances.

Hierarchically above those things are mice, rats and squirrels. Our studies in the field have shown that mice, rats and squirrels live almost exclusively on a diet of avocados (two avocado trees border our sprawling estate), cable TV and Internet wiring and dishwashers. Every time a repairman comes to the house, he rummages around in the crawlspace and emerges with a chewed-up cable or hose or air-conditioning duct and says, "Here's your problem, right here. Squirrels or rats ate it."

There is some evidence that they also eat Jacuzzis, because we are constantly having to have hoses replaced on our backyard spa.

We quit leaving food around ever since rats got into a box of booze-filled chocolates and they spent all night reeling around and shouting and taking pictures of their passed-out co-partyers with their pants pulled down. But, as we've seen, just about everything passes for food in the rodent world.

Squirrels work the day shift in our yard, while the rats and mice take over at dusk. Joining them on the night shift are possums, raccoons and skunks. Skunks have been making huge leaps in population in our yard and neighborhood. They parade up our street like a crocodile of nuns at night. Last week, a skunk nailed a dog next door, pretty much right outside our bedroom window, so that was a nice bit of nature-living right there.

You can't not see rats in our backyard at night. They're scrabbling up and down the avocado trees and the banana trees - our son saw two of them one evening sitting side by side on a tree branch watching TV through our bedroom window.

The rat-mouse-squirrel problem has abated somewhat over the past few weeks. We're attributing the attrition to a couple of cats that have shown up recently. We haven't had a cat problem in a long time, because of our formerly faithful cat-stalker Jimmy. But Jimmy is 15 years old now, mostly blind and mostly deaf and has lost all interest in cats. He'd have to down half a jug of Viagra to get up the desire to chase a cat.

Jimmy's diminished impact on the natural food chain has caused an imbalance in the neighborhood not just with the resurgence of cats, but also with the appearance of coyotes in our front lawn of late. A couple of weeks ago, we had three of them dancing around on our front lawn in the pre-dawn hours.

We're going to make a bold/rash statement right now: We like coyotes. There's nothing about a coyote that bothers us - yet. They've never eaten a pet of ours. We suppose if coyotes ate our dog, it would earn them a couple of hash marks in the debit column. But if you live in our neighborhood, just steps from Los Coyotes Diagonal and a quick hop to Coyote Creek, you forfeit the right to be outraged, or even surprised, to see a couple of coyotes in your yard.

On Saturday morning (and Sunday morning and Monday morning) we were screeched awake at 6 a.m. by a pair of fledgling red-tailed hawks.

They're frequently perched atop the utility pole in the northeast corner of our acreage, screeching and whistling. Usually, one hangs out in a pine tree across the street and the other stays on the telephone pole, and they holler at one another:

"How do you fly? I forgot already!"

"I don't know! I think you just have to jump!"

"You jump!"`

"You!"

So, the ecology is getting weirder. The squirrels usually scamper around chittering on the utility pole. They've been understandably quiet - if they're even still around - with the new presence of the hawks.

The rats and mice, diminished to a degree in their number, have been a little more careful in their forays into the avocado tree. The cats, generally busy stalking rodents at night, have been skittish with the coyotes coming to the neighborhood.

We're not sure if the ideal equilibrium will be reached - or even what that is - and what it means to our Internet access and our ability to view "Louie" on-demand.